Wednesday, January 11 - Bahasa Melayu

This is the Blue Mosque in Shah Alam. It is one of the biggest in the far East and can hold 16,000 people at one time. Hopefully I'll get to go inside someday!
see all photos »

Tonight I went to dinner with the mom of one of my first graders. She took me out to her side of town, to a suburb called Shah Alam. We ate at Nando's, which is a Portuguese restaurant chain here. The food was good - lemon herb chicken (with a kick!) and rice. It can be a challenge to find food here that isn't spicy. :)

After dinner she took me to a language-learning orientation meeting. The Malay language is officially called "Bahasa Melayu" or "Language of the Malays." Note that it is not "Language of the Malaysians." This is the result of a government decision and has been a source of contention with the Malaysians who are Chinese or Indian or one of many other races here.

From what I've gathered, the language-learning method that many of the workers here use is patterned after the way children usually learn a language. The language learner is assigned a "nurturer," someone who is native to the language and will see the student through each phase of the process. The learner begins with basic words, though he is not yet allowed to see or spell them. This is to help the learner become attuned to the pronunciation of the words rather than getting confused or distracted by the spelling of them. After he has spent many hours in conversation, he moves into storytelling, the second phase of the process. This was the orientation meeting that I got to attend. The nurturer uses wordless children's books to elicit descriptions of each page. If the learner doesn't know a word, he can ask the nurturer, who will then write the new word on that page of the storybook, thereby helping the learner associate the word with that part of the story and making it easier to remember its meaning later.

That's as much as I know about the process, but it seems like a pretty smart way to go about learning the language - especially the part about using the wordless storybooks!